I've been watching this debate with much interest. I have to respond at this point with a number of thoughts and opinions. I hope this is viewed in the constructive manner in which I intend. What is drupal and why does drupal have such a large userbase? What made drupal big? What is important to focus on? These are important questions to me and should inform decisions that we make, especially decisions about default theme. One person in the debate supported their opinions by pointing out their association with the production of one of the largest sites using drupal. In my mind that is the wrong way to look at things and demonstrates a major danger for any f/oss project. What the majority of users need and want will have little to do with that the largest users need and want. I'm more interested in the opinions of people that have implemented drupal for large number of small groups than those that have done the largest high profile projects. As well, please keep in mind that this mailing list is not anywhere close to a representation of the users of drupal. What themes are popular? what have people, by their actions, told us they like/need/want? how does that inform or relate to the construction of the default theme? Drupal is what it is not because of the one or two huge high profile sites using it. It is what it is because of the multiple thousands of small sites. The large folks will always have the money to make it do anything they want, so we must focus on what people with limited resources need -- in other words, the majority of users. browsers: we must make a default theme that works in any and all the browsers in common use. All the small organizations I have helped out still have a good percentage of folks that use browsers that people here have said are not necessary to support in a default theme (yes this includes making sure nothing breaks too badly with IE 5). Ignoring those users would be a huge blow to the growth of drupal. When I do a default installation to show drupal to a potential client, I can rest comfortably knowing that no matter what they hit it with, bluemarine will hold up and display as I expect. The goal of a default theme is not to wow the user, a default theme should first and foremost have a simple goal -- do not get in the way of the user looking around and learning how things work. window size: some seem to think that just because the average developer has a huge screen and most brand new computers have big screens that we can simply ignore the older machines and folks that, believe it or not, are still browsing the web at 600x800 pixels. To limit the core default design to large screens is foolish and will also limit the satisfaction people have with their installation. rounded corners: please don't do it! don't re-create why slashcode's default theme sucked (I thought I left those messes far behind when I started using drupal as my primary cms instead of slashcode a few years back). A default theme should be simple and have minimal bells and whistles. Avoid overly complex formatting and too many images. fluid vs fixed width. For the use of node edit and creation screens, as has been pointed out, the default drupal theme must be fluid. Allow this to be changed in CSS or wherever if the user desires a fixed width, but please have the default state be variable width. What is the use of a default theme? it is not to look really fancy and uber-cool, it should be simple and not detract from someone seeing drupal -- seeing the existence of header, footer, left and right sidebars and blocks; primary and secondary links, etc. (how they are separate and inter-related). A default theme should make the structure of drupal (blocks / sidebars / regions / menus / primary and secondary links) as clear as possible to a new user, not hide these distinctions in a sea of whitespace. I think there are different debates overlapping in this discussion so far. It is one thing to create really fancy looking themes to distribute *with* drupal, it is a completely different thing to design a default theme that will be the first place that most people interact with drupal. A default theme is about functionality and ease of modification of colors and sizes; optional themes distributed with core are about art and design. This sort of concern is not "design by committee," it is about defining specs for a designer to work from. Let's discuss what we all need and want in a default theme *before* the design work is done. Let that set of needs guide the designer and then get out of the way and let the designer design. Let's talk about what the header should be from a functional perspective, not about our like or dislike of washed out blue. I don't care how wide the left or right columns are, I care that I can easily change their size via editing a css file. I don't really like the washed out blue tones, but I could not care less as long as I can easily modify values in a css file and get the result I want. The default theme not only needs to be clean but it must be easy to change into something else with only css modifications. Drupal should allow me to let my designers tweak things without learning new skills. Please don't do fancy hacks to have cute rounded corners; make clear and understandable code and styles that anyone with a certain level of knowledge can manipulate. Save the fancy stuff for non-default themes. Much of what the theme under debate does and demonstrates is wonderful for a theme distributed with drupal, but in my opinion fails all tests for what a default theme should be. I think we need to separate the debate and discussion of what a default theme needs from the discussion/review of any visual design mockups or proposals. --Eric -- ------------------------------------------- Openflows Community Technology Lab, Inc. New York | Toronto | Montreal | Vienna http://openflows.com People are intelligent. Machines are tools.